Trump arrived the White House for his second term with a more aggressive profile in his foreign policy, ready to kick the board with invasions, wars and genocide. The war issue is of long standing and has a central place for U.S. imperialism, which achieved its position by force of cannon fire. It is worth asking how the relationship between the State-military companies and the new developments have evolved in the dawn of big tech.
By Manuel Velasco
Technological corporations such as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. (known big tech), have gained crucial power in the capitalism of the 21st century. Their influence has surpassed the use in the daily lives of their users to establish themselves as a strategic pillar of the military power of imperialism. The U.S. case has a history that starts, at least, since the post-war period with its establishment as global hegemony and the development of the Military-Industrial Complex.
The Industrial-Military Complex. One hand washes the other
After World War II, the United States established itself as the capitalist hegemon in the Occident. To safeguard its imperialist leadership, it was necessary to reinforce its military power. The so-called “Industrial-Military Complex” (IMC) began to develop as a barrier against the enemies’ threats, with a special emphasis during the post-war in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. At the same time, the IMC served as a financial shortcut for capitalist accumulation, presenting itself as a new safe investment niche due to its strategic role for the erection of the new power.
Popularized by Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell speech referring to the influence of the armamentists lobby, the IMC was consolidated as a structural interrelationship between the Pentagon, Congress and private corporations. This alliance is not an anomaly, but the culmination of the state as guarantor of private profitability: through the “revolving doors,” former government officials transition to boards of directors of military industry giants, securing multibillion-dollar contracts. This mechanism transforms the war and the preparation for the conflict into an inexhaustible commodity, where military spending functions as a massive state subsidy that transfers wealth from social sectors towards financial capital and shareholders, perpetuating a permanent war economy necessary to sustain the expansion of global markets at gunpoint.
The invisible hand and the free market are pushed aside in the face of technological changes driven by the military economy under the tutelage of the State. Instead of the needs of users or the ideas of entrepreneurs, it is the corporations that drive and profit from innovation processes, complementing their interests with the Pentagon’s purposes.
Despite all the advantages for the bourgeoisie, the military industrial complex also presents limits determined by the natural tendency of capitalism. In the same way that technological improvements guarantee greater benefits for the enterprises, as the organic composition of capital increases, the profitability derived from the relation between total investment and final profits falls.
Recent decades
The transfer of technological innovations promoted by the State through public universities or State-funded research to corporations that privatize technical-scientific knowledge for their own profit-making purposes is typical of the capitalist system. What is “new” is that in the most recent decades the relationship between innovations created by the military-industrial complex and then transferred to civilian life, as occurred with aviation or telecommunications, has been inverted to give place to new technologies that obtain data originally in the civilian sphere and are then used for military purposes.
After the 9/11 attacks, the use of digital infrastructure and technology for defensive and military purposes became more relevant and big tech grabbed the headlines. Companies such as Palantir Technologies, founded by Peter Thiel (PayPal) and initially financed by In-Q-Tel (venture capital created by the CIA), became key players at processing large volumes of data to identify targets in conflict zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the economic front, the 2008 crisis was the other major milestone for the rise of big tech, as different factors combined to bring technology companies to center stage. The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates, offering cheap money for companies like Google and Facebook to finance their expansion. Enough time had passed since the dotcom crisis (2000) for the technology sector to regain stability and the confidence that investors had lost in real estate. Finally, the new digital resources were also seized by companies in other areas to circumvent the crisis, outsourcing services and automating processes to reduce personnel costs by laying off workers while increasing the productivity of those who kept their jobs.
Closer in time, with the second Trump administration, the budget of the Department of Defense -now called War Department- for the development of digital technology grew dramatically, concentrating its spending on infrastructure, communication networks, data processing and science focused, among other things, on Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G, biotechnology and space technology. All this led to an increase in funding for big tech contracts, a leap in a process that had been going on for years.
Already in 2013, the payment of 463 million euros that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paid to access data collected by Amazon resonated loudly. From the deal, the company built a private cloud infrastructure for the agency to process classified data, enabling the modernization of U.S. intelligence big data analysis. In the case of Google, there were more than 3,000 employees who protested in 2018 against Project Maven, planned between the company and the Pentagon to improve the accuracy and damage capability of U.S. forces on their enemies. Since 2017, Palantir has been the prime contractor behind Maven, for which it developed a product known as the “Maven Smart System” with which it seeks to optimize battlefield decision-making using AI. This year Amazon signed a $581,318,585 new contract to support the U.S. Air Force’s Cloud One program.
Middle East as a laboratory
Undoubtedly, the most representative case of capitalist militarism is located in the Middle East. Like a laboratory, the most sophisticated technologies are placed in Israel’s hands to sustain genocide against populations that survive with the most rudimentary of methods. With the backing of at least 450 multinational corporations – Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon, among these – Zionism has managed to co-opt many of the best brains to support its infrastructure, research and development (R&D) and the use of AI in the service of the occupation.
The use of AI has become central to modern Israeli military doctrine, integrating it into anti-air defense systems and offensive automation. On the defensive side, AI enhances the accuracy of the Iron Dome and the new Iron Beam laser system, allowing the interception of projectiles and drones with immediate reaction times and reduced costs. On the offensive side, it uses advanced algorithms such as Lavender, The Gospely Where’s Daddy to process massive volumes of surveillance data, identify potential targets in seconds and predict their location in real time, which has transformed its operations into a high-speed “target factory.”
The advantages obtained from the use of new technologies were also used by the United States in its operations against Iran, being able to identify and attack up to 1000 targets in 24 hours using Maven. Also, according to several media reports, the hacking of the network of surveillance cameras extended by the Iranian regime and now used by the United States to geolocate and execute precise attacks, such as the assassination of Ali Khamenei, was also important.
Stop the barbarism
Capitalism is once again showing its most savage side with the advance of the ultra-right in the world, the widening of the gap between rich and poor and the outbreak of new military conflicts driven by imperialism. Although the term “Military-Industrial Complex” refers specifically to the U.S. case, there is an overall relationship between capitalism with technology and war as major business catalysts that dynamize certain business sectors.
Under this system, technology at the service of labor exploitation, the depredation of nature and the increase of the destructive capacity of the military apparatus, dig their own grave provoking recurring crises. There is no room for a “peaceful” workaround of the issue with the logic of capital reigning. Starting from the prohibition of all technological development applied against the peoples and workers, it is necessary to advance towards the democratization of production and science so that decisions are placed in the hands of the workers, to distribute working hours so that there is no more overload on some and unemployment for others, to reorient industry to meet social needs and reverse the conditions of misery in which millions live today. To achieve this, we must strengthen a revolutionary alternative like the International Socialist League to bring together activists around the whole world who are fighting for a socialist solution to the crisis.
